Down with Beriberi

American forces have won the second battle of Bataan. This time the enemy was beriberi, ancient scourge of the Orient's rice-eating people, which kills hundreds of thousands every year and cripples millions more. Bataan used to be one of the worst plague spots. Reports Dr. Robert R. Williams after an inspection of test areas on the peninsula: in the year ended April I there was not a single death that could be laid to beriberi.

For Robert Runnels Williams, the victory marks a climax in a 40-year war against beriberi which he began, as it happened, in the Philippines. At 24, an unknown research chemist in Manila's Bureau of Science, Williams noted that chronic beriberi was dramatically cured by an extract made from rice bran. That was in 1910. It gave Williams the germ of an idea which flowered, 25 years later, in his isolating vitamin BI and then synthesizing it cheaply.

Spoiled Rice. Beriberi in the rice bowl proved to be one of the simplest diseases to prevent and cure. It is caused by a vitamin (mainly BI) deficiency and can be stopped by putting enough BI in the diet.-There is plenty of BI in the outer coating of the rice grain and its seed germ, but both are removed as bran in the milling. Nearly all of the world's billion rice-eaters mill and polish their grain. They eat vitamin-poor white rice, and feed the vitamin-rich bran to their chickens.

It would do no good to tell people to stop milling their rice. In some areas, to eat white rice is a point of pride, even among poor peasants. Still more compelling, natural or brown rice spoils so fast that it cannot be stored until the next harvest. Dr. Williams had assigned the moneymaking patents on B1 to the Williams-Waterman Fund; after V-J day the fund set out to put the vitamins back in the Asian's rice.

For their first full-dress test the researchers picked Bataan, across Manila Bay from Williams' old laboratory. They drew a line down the peninsula. East of the line, all the rice to be eaten was milled the ordinary way, then mixed (200 parts to one) with rice which had been coated with Bi, niacin and iron. West of the line, the Filipinos ate plain white rice.

Spoiled Experiment. The results were startling and prompt. It took only a few weeks for people in the enriched rice zone to feel better, and in three months the death rate showed a drop. Then enriched rice began to be bootlegged across the line to the control zone, where it gummed up the experiment but saved lives.

Last January, Dr. Williams returned to the Philippines to see the results for himself. He traveled along the route of the 1942 Death March, and in villages like Balanga he was greeted by cheering, grateful crowds of healthy people.

Within five years, all the Philippines are expected to get enriched rice. And other rice-eating nations are arranging to start programs of their own. The cost: 35-c- per mouth per year, most of which the people themselves pay in an extra dime added to the price of a 100-lb. sack of rice.

* The lack of other B-complex vitamins causes other deficiency diseases, e.g., pellagra results chiefly from a niacin shortage.

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